Yaron Herman didn't sit down at a piano until he was 16. Before that, he played on Israel's national junior basketball team; a serious knee injury ended that path and, almost by accident, opened this one. With no formal training behind him, he was touring Europe, the US, and Asia as a solo act within a few years — during that early run he became the first jazz pianist to perform inside Beijing's Forbidden City, the walled imperial palace complex that had never hosted a jazz set before him.

His recording career opened in 2003 with Takes 2 to Know 1 (Sketch), followed by Variations (2006, Laborie, solo piano) and, under the name Newtopia Project, Suite Elegiaque (2006). A Time for Everything (2007, Laborie, trio) won a Victoire du Jazz, France's answer to the Grammys for jazz; the recognition kept building the next year, when Herman himself won Victoires du Jazz in the best new instrumentalist category in September 2008. Muse (2009, Sunnyside/Laborie), made with bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Gerald Cleaver and featuring the Quatuor Ebène string quartet, picked up three more Victoires du Jazz nominations and was named album of the year on iTunes' own choice awards.

In 2010, Follow the White Rabbit became his first release on ACT Music, the German label, built around a rhythm section of bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Tommy Crane; Alter Ego (2012, ACT, quintet), recorded at Recall Studio in Pompignan, France, kept the relationship going. The label climb continued from there: Everyday (2015) was his debut for Blue Note Records, the label that signed Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, followed by Y (2017) on the same imprint. In 2019 he moved to Decca Records, the classical-and-jazz label whose roster includes Renée Fleming and Rita Ora, for Songs of The Degrees. Along the way he also took on the role of jury president for the piano competition at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and became a mentor at its Jazz Academy — a notable turn for a self-taught player judging a field of conservatory-trained ones.

After ten albums built on solo, duo, and trio settings, Herman changed direction again in 2022 with Alma, an entirely improvised solo-piano project. Then, in April 2025, he released Radio Paradise on Naïve (catalog BLV8789), recorded in July 2024 — his most structurally different record yet, a working band built around two tenor saxophonists, Maria Grand and Alexandra Grimal, with bassist Haggai Cohen Milo and drummer Ziv Ravitz. Herman has said he built the record partly out of frustration with the piano itself — "the lack of breath and sensuality of the blown note" — which is why he brought in two horns to sit inside, and sometimes against, each other across the record. He's still touring behind it in 2026.

Herman is often described as one of the most technically fluent and structurally exploratory pianists of his generation — some critics have reached for the comparison "the Keith Jarrett of his generation," though Herman's own path (no formal training until 16, a basketball-injury origin story, a jury presidency at Montreux without ever attending a conservatory) sets him apart from that lineage as much as it invites the comparison. His catalog moves restlessly between formats: solo piano, string-quartet-augmented chamber jazz, ACT-era quintet work, Blue Note trio records, and now a two-saxophone frontline on Radio Paradise — a stylistic range built on treating each new project as a genuine formal experiment rather than a variation on the last one.